The part about the United States says this:
> While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship.
And you say:
> Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information in hope that bad actors will not influence the public.
The first major heading in the article is this:
> Poland blocked human rights sites; India same-sex dating sites
Not exactly the same thing as individual companies trying to combat misinformation. Even if those things could be twisted as good faith efforts, how would this help make politics more honest?
Having a conversation about the United States is fine, I suppose, but I'd much rather understand how actual governments are censoring things around the world. It's at least what the article is mostly about. If nothing else, it'd be nice for discussions here to actually have some relation to the article rather than being something people quickly upvote and jump in to espouse whatever preconceived opinion they had.
I completely disagree with this. The parent didn't mention companies once. This must be some kind of 'blue-black or white-gold' thing because the rest of your post reads like nonsense to me. I'm sorry that I haven't got anything substantial to add to this, but I'm just very confused by the fact that your comment is the highest response right now.
>bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage.
which I interpret broadly as enticing people to do things not sanctioned by the status quo morality. Some governments aren't happy about sexual liberty, others about certain religious or political belief. The internet with the liberation of information also liberated a certain relativism that is corrosive to the epistemic fundament of established power.
> “When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,” she said. “The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”
What this alludes to is that somehow 2010 Open Internet Order 1. equals the concept of "Net Neutrality" as a whole and 2. was the backbone of internet freedom in the United States and both are untrue. In fact, none of the fear astroturfing that took place during that campaign ever came true. I'm interested in knowing who started that campaign and why.
I'm always in favor of iterating on broad ideas like Net Neutrality but it is constantly being used to misrepresent the state of freedom on the internet.
Tech companies were stupid, but so were the users. And not only those that believed in more esoteric conspiracies.
I always click on the comments first myself to see if the article is even worth reading.
I think that was the idea and it quickly devolved into horse shit.
I would love a site that was like Read-It but forced people to "read-it" first.
If it’s an interesting title and the score and qty of comments is high, i go to the comments.
I’m pretty much in /all and I hide tons of subs using RES...
So my feed on /all is pretty clean and tailored to things I’m open to.
With that said; I do the same thing... but I rarely upvote a story - I do check out stories but far far less than the comments.
I do the same here on HN. Especially here because there are a ton of smart people here and HN is pretty strict on being anti-troll - but i dont count ant-trolling as censorship, it’s forum-housekeeping.
Before reddit I mostly was on slashdot, and some other forums that don’t exit any longer.
I'm the worst on HN at commenting on a topic before/instead of reading the article.
But I see HN not as a place to share random articles around the web, but as a place to discuss interesting topics with a (relative to other alternatives) civil and educated userbase.
I'm usually not super interested in what a single person has to say on a given subject (i.e. the linked article) as much as I am in the collective thoughts/responses from the HN community.
Again, admitting that I'm likely part of the problem, but just being honest, and -- in my own mind, at least -- feels like a mostly justified reason for making the most of the time that I have/feel like spending on these topics.
If a similar community existed that was (again, relative to other alternatives) civil & educated, but just allowed discussion on topics vs. links to articles, I'd be hanging out/engaging there instead.
HN just works, so it's a lot less work just to read the discussion here.
A few weeks back I saw a front page article written in terrible english, being factually wrong on almost all points (it was talking about tech history so you can be objectively wrong), and was like 2 pages of rambling - blogspam 101.
But the title was something complaining about Electron and it was clear that nobody read it and everyone was just bandwagoning on Electron.
Then there was that outrage about a guy who was maintaining faker.js and people spinning same old BS about licenses and how everyone should use GPL - meanwhile it was obvious nobody even looked at what the library did because none of the discussion applied.
So people interested in discussing points should maybe find a different site for this - it's really dragging down the quality of content.
We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism.
And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".
If corporations and a heavily authoritarian government team up to crack down on anyone who they believe is the slightest treat to the success of some imagined single-minded Volk, then yes we can talk about fascism.
Until that time I think you can at best put down an argument for why you believe this censorship situation will be a slippery slope that ends in fascism.
History will tell what the consequences of corporatism + negative Volk will be.
Words have meanings beyond "things I don't like".
Its really, really not feudalism, which is highly de-centralized.
Multiple corporations (with their 'fiefdoms') is decentralised from government, in a similar manner to peers being decentralised from government (or the crown).
You could either argue 'not as much so', or that 'corporate lobbying, unions, and party donations have a similar influence on policy'; regardless I think it's an interesting idea.
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
Don't really get all the downvotes. I could extend more on it, and explain my reasoning, but I feel like HN is too caught in this "tech moguls are saviors" and even if they weren't and they wouldn't be where they are, somebody else would be a bad actor.
Except there is no “holding of land in exchange for labor”, the only concrete element of the description you quote.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
Now why do I call this feudalism? To be honest I could call it various other things, the most "getting to the root" would be "class warfare". I chose to call it feudalism in this case, because feudalism was basically the last period/time we chose to call it honestly what it is: Getting ruled from above. They want to implement censorship, because even though we always say "one day it might work against you", but for them it does not. Ever.
So when we introduced parliaments we split law-making power from nobility to politicians, elected by the people. But if you are an "accumulator of wealth", you can basically act as a modern fief. Especially if you work together with politicians.
Governments asking favours of these corporate lords looks centralised and makes us pay attention, but it requires their consent to get anywhere.
> We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't.
And then he said it's facism. To which I say, no, it's feudalism:
> Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs [...]. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. [0]
I don't get why people downvote me so much. It's basically a direct answer
Edit: And when he did it, most of the western world/press fawned on him and praised him as a genius until he went and allied himself with Hitler.
Chemistry isn't a sub-field of Physics either.
Chemistry is just applied Physics.
And yes, for all you mathematicians out there, Physics is just applied math. :)
Oh but it does. (The force of gravity is essential for some (al)chemical techniques.)
He literally coined the term when talking about his movement. If anyone has claim to what the definition was, it's him.
But history is written by the winners and I'm sure modern day fascists would like to distance themselves from that history as much as possible...and thus the term gets narrowed and redefined.
No, but it does make it part of "Newtonism."
Sure, but that doesn't mean any one aspect of what he did, in isolation from the rest, is "the definition of fascism". (And the understanding of the genericized term is at least as much shaped by Naziism as Italian fascism, anyhow; this might annoy Mussolini if he was around to be annoyed -- frankly, that Nazis are taken as an example of "fascism" would probably annoy Hitler, too -- but, you know, that's just the way language evolves; if we're talking about Mussolini's movement in Italy specifically, we generally say "Italian fascism", not just "fascism" unless there is context to indicate that we are specifically talking about Italy.)
> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader
is the definition of fascism. This is a tool often deployed by fascists.
No. 47, if you'd like to read it.
It is a technique used by fascist regimes, communist regimes, dictatorships (basically totalitarian regimes of all stripes.)
It is a separate concept from fascism.
EDIT downvoters seem to have weak English skills...
Well, its arguably corporatism, which exists in lots of non-fascist systems as well as being a part of fascism, and propagandizing the population, which also is done by lots of non-fascists systems, but unless its coupled with totalitarianism and militant, xenophobic nationalism I don't think going "fascism" is literally accurate of the current state, though its definitely a risk (since the propagandization + corporatism easily enables at least totalitarianism, and is also quite leverageable for the rest.)
The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources. It seems to me that they choice a cautious and sensible approach.
Social media is many-to-many. Quite a few people seem to have decided this imposes the same sort of centralized responsibility that exists with one-to-many communications, but this is not at all obvious to me. On social networks there is no single stream of information, thus there is no necessity for editorial decisions, thus the mechanism by which one-to-many broadcasters become responsible for the content they carry is not present.
Recommendation systems complicate this somewhat, admittedly. If platform owners are putting their fingers on the scale (algorithmically or otherwise) to determine what gets exposure, some of the responsibility comes back. However, in the simple case of e.g. Twitter showing you content from people you've explicitly chosen to follow, I don't see how they've got any more responsibility than exists in the one-to-one scenario.
Unfortunately this same logic isn’t used when discussing the PLCAA or gun manufacturers in general.
Property rights are a thing and those who own the servers can determine what they will store and present to other users.
Conservative groups that don't spread misinformation and hatred are thriving on FB and Twitter. Change the law to make them store and publish anything not already illegal will turn them into cesspools like the various *chan sites inside of a month and advertisers will leave as will people with a conscience.
"The president of the United States has been using [...]" is present perfect continuous tense (expressing an action continuing in the present that began in the past), not past tense.
I think there may be some legitimate truth to this statement that you are not seeing.
Donald Trump is far from the only bad actor we've had in our history, and things weren't running smooth as silk before he arrived on the scene, but you sure wouldn't know it from the way people talk.
However, maybe I'm just unlucky, but I have a number of family members who are predisposed to believing anything they see on the internet. I can see the need for social distancing when it comes to viral content too.
So censor what they see to ensure they only receive the information you approve of correct?
I am not so sure. Did they really have a choice?
I think the financial incentives are lined up so that inevitably such a click-baity behavior and culture is nearly impossible to ignore for the news media as a whole. How can everyone choose not to report together, when it makes such a good-selling piece of content?
I am starting to think that algorithm-driven news sources and targeted advertising is something we should consider banning. Breaking up our collective culture into small bubbles of isolated realities is something that is driving many countries, not just the US, apart.
Even in Finland I see people who are not only entertaining, but 100% believing all the Trump conspiracies based on stories, Twitter posts etc. picked up from social media, although we pretty much don't have any mainstream news here. Even if the educated and responsible journalists have been drowned by the flood of fake news, do-it-yourself journalism and information warfare. They cannot keep up and don't have the time to fact check everything. And when they do, the people who believe in this... shit, have already moved on to the next piece of content that supports their view.
F this.
“who controls the past controls the future. who controls the present, controls the past”
For example teenage girls searching for weight loss on YouTube were more engaged when shown videos on eating disorders like anorexia. YouTube addressed that by tweaking the algorithm, but there's an endless number of edge cases like that and fixing it by tweaking the algorithm is like playing an never ending game of whack-a-mole. It's fundamentally unwinnable - the problem is optimizing for engagement itself.
As many people here may have noticed at some point, the same thing happened with flat Earthers and other conspiracy theories. In fact for a while it was common knowledge that you could start on any YouTube video and keep watching from the recommendations, and with an hour or so that would eventually lead to crazytown - videos just showing bigfoot and aliens and flat earth stuff.
When the internet first became a more widely-used thing I thought that it would be a great equalizer, giving every person in the world a voice, and it would democratize information flow and empowerment.
I thought that open debate would absolutely crush all misinformation - and I wrongly thought that nobody would see any profit in spreading it, because their reputation would be destroyed, once proven to be a liar.
Holy shit was I wrong.
Plus a ton of guys arguing about free beer or speech, and me having zero understanding of why any of it was a big deal.
You won't find anyone on this board more quick to defend censorship along political lines.
It is not unusual for older, wealthier elements of society to question the value of free expression for the masses. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/democratic-enlightenment-philosophy-r...
The folks who makes lots of claims which are false know this, and do so anyway because it is effective at swaying public opinion.
"never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
Either something is OPINION, or it's FACT. And anything that is Factual, could have the privilege to be labeled as such. Things that are proven not-true or misinformation, or unsupported - they could be permanently labelled "bullshit" and why the hell can't we do this?
Because people will skirt the system. Unless we have a government that supports rule of law.
That's not how it worked. The moment Gutenberg invented the printing press, printers popped up everywhere and printed anything and everything. That means newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, flyers, advertisements, bills, leaflets, everything.
It was cheap to print, not remotely restricted to the rich, and you certainly did not need to buy a newspaper. Schools print newspapers, businesses do, too.
A lot of it was political, too. For a famous example, see "Common Sense".
sure, you could cheaply print stuff, but you had to (pay people to) stand on a lot of street corners to get your message out there.
It'll be the end of civilization.
Everyone should agree with the rich and powerful.
If you are uneducated (and almost certainly poor), you do not see reality for how it is, but instead you see shadows against the wall. Only through the process of a dialectical education can you begin to see reality for how it is. As a result, only the educated enlightened individuals should become kings or the guardians of a state.
Any system which agrees with this allegory (and most of Western Philosophy implicity agrees with it) also results in the notion that poor people should not be enfranchised at the same level as wealthier people because they cannot be trusted to govern.
If you reject this allegory, than the fundamental justification for hierarchy (some are more fit to rule than others) and correspondingly the state is shattered
My interpretation of the allegory is that it suggests that everyone "should" employ epistemic humility.
That genie is out of the bottle.
And Ayatollah Khomeini.
Mike Wallace effectively gave the KKK a forum reaching everybody in the United States... That's much more effective than Twitter.
Your comment doesn't read any better.
They might be able to access more people in raw numbers but we also have a lot more people in raw numbers on the planet. Percentage wise they're insignificant, with virtually all of the country not willing to listen to their bullshit.
As someone from the security industry, you should be a lot more resistant to bogeymen.
That seems like a claim that needs some examples. By itself it's hard to take seriously. Which governments and which corporations are driving which narrative, exactly?
(1) Identification of potential dissidents. Those who violate lockdowns or mask orders are most likely to resist state control.
(2) Normalizing control over common activities. It takes four weeks to normalize a new habit. "Two weeks to stop the spread" has been going on since March (that's thirty-two weeks and counting). Americans are now habituated to state-controlled social behaviors.
(3) Destruction of in-person social channels outside the sphere of state electronic surveillance.
(4) Normalizing fear of non-conformists ("you're killing grandpa").
(5) Destruction of non-sanctioned economies. Global companies have effectively been part of the state for decades, and can easily weather the storm. Smaller businesses can not, which dries up cashflow outside of state-approved channels.
The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic. I feel absolutely no sense that people are more willing to submit to Government control now or anything like that, and it's the same even talking to people down in Victoria that had a big second wave and way longer lockdown than we did. Their willingness to comply was to stop the spread of the virus so they could get out of lockdown, and it worked, and now the restrictions are being rolled back.
It's frustrating to hear people in the media here crowing on about 'authoritarianism' and 'government control' over this, especially because the State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus. But at the same time, these conservative commentators who are aligned with our right-wing Federal Government happily ignore actual authoritarian, draconian laws that the Feds are passing to give police and intelligence services unprecedented powers for warrantless mass surveillance etc. over the last decade...
I'd even go as far as saying that the pandemic would actually be a really bad time for a Government to try and 'normalise' increased government control, because there's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over (if we get a vaccine for instance). The desire to throw off all the restrictions once the virus is gone is just too strong.
> The feeling is that people want to get back to normal, but understand that most of the regulations were necessary given the seriousness of the pandemic.
It is highly debatable that lockdowns ever were, or currently are, either necessary or effective.
> State Governments that are in charge of pandemic restrictions have demonstrated little desire to maintain restrictions longer than was sensible given the virus.
The US is in the thirty-second week of "two weeks to stop the spread".
Credibility went right out the window when the powers-that-be decreed weddings and funerals as too risky, but protests and riots as totally fine.
Not to mention the long list of politicians whose personal lives seem to be an exception from the rules they have imposed on others.
> There's no legitimate or logical reason to maintain it once the pandemic is over.
I remember airports before 9/11. Hell, I remember the US before 9/11.
The ironically-named Patriot Act represented a massive seizure of power and a wholesale trampling of American civil rights. None of the airport security measures introduced were necessary or effective, and yet they continue to this day.
Since 9/11, the United States has been at war in the Middle East for twenty years, squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to achieve... nothing.
This was neither legitimate nor logical. But it did make a bunch of politicians and their friends very powerful and very wealthy.
I also remember, at the time, the moral frenzy that enveloped the nation after the fall of the twin towers.
Things now feel the same from where I sit.
Beautiful list though and well said. I've been trying to think of a succinct way to summarize some of those concepts and I think you've broken them up well.
Sounds insane?
So did the patriot act in the 90s.
Yet here we are 20 years later still doing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid
One guy later was the underwear bomber. Thank God that didn't take.
Sweden managed to just ask their citizens to behave properly and it worked.
I think a close reading of the OP would show they aren't portraying the state with great friendliness. Some run the show for the benefit of powerful forces and to various extents try to think about long term goals. "Bad Actors" is a decent shorthand for group trying also serving the wealthy and themselves but with a destructively short term agenda.
The key point the GP makes and I think you're missing is that stop manipulation isn't a matter of removing "tyrants" but creating an active, educated population.
I think "cure" is too strong a word; certainly it is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient. (See: the state of most debate and discussion.) I don't know what would be a cure, or even if that's even possible. Censorship definitely seems to be the wrong approach. Since it's hard to improve what you can't measure, perhaps this attempt to measure censorship will be helpful.
I am very much for "free speech" - but at some point, you have to shut certain topics out of reasonable debate, because at the end of the day, if we have to keep debating things like this, we've learned nothing.
I saw this clear as day when I was watching live streams during the Portland federal courthouse protest. I would watch these for several hours per day as a form of entertainment. When I read the news articles written the following day, I was completely shocked at how much bias was present in the mainstream news media.
During these protests it essentially went like this: during the day, the protest was 100% peaceful, hardly any police. Literally a perfect 100% peaceful protest. As night came, the crowd would shift. The peaceful people would leave and then a new group would start showing up, dressed in all black and start doing full blown violence against police. Starting fires, destroying private property and many similar illegal and dangerous stuff.
The following day I read articles on CNN that said there was very little violence and it was almost entirely peaceful. This was false because there was tons of violence at the night. When you read articles in fox news they say the protest was mostly violent. This was also false because the day time protest was 100% peaceful.
This type of news reporting is pushing division politics and social media further fans the flames because people can confirm their narrative and also get false reporting from idiots on twitter/facebook which spreads misinformation.
I could also tell this is heavily influencing people's view on the world because I would debate people on reddit. For liberal people, they would link me CNN and washington post articles to support their arguments. If I argued with conservatives, they would link me fox news and breitbart articles. This is what they're linking to me as their "proof" to support their argument. If I responded by saying that fox news/cnn is biased reporting, they would jump to personal attacks at me, almost like this was their favorite football team I was bashing.
As for riots, my dad remarked to me that the TV media would represent the crowds as large or small simply by where they pointed the camera and the zoom level used. And they would, depending on their agenda.
Mass media has always been heavily agenda based.
News almost completely ignored it.
And there you have it.
I don't know where you're from, but it's part of the Victorian (possibly Australian) curriculum for all year 12 students. And we still ended up with Rupert Murdoch.
We were taught common logical fallacies, and then tested on how well we could spot instances of them in a news article. But I remember also being asked to write persuasive essays, without being taught how to reason in a way that avoided those fallacies.
Every single invocation of an expert is an argument from authority.
Every single invocation of logic like "it is more like nature therefor it is more good" is a naturalistic fallacy.
Do we even need to get to other ones like "appeal to emotion"?
Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily describe reality (given that there are an infinite number of possible logics based on which axioms you start with), and that being worried about and trying to avoid "logical fallacies" in our reasoning does not help us see reality more closely to how it is.
Naturalistic fallacy really depends on how much you value the natural state of things, but it is usually used to point out that just because it is 'natural' doesn't mean it is good or sensible to do/continue.
Appeal to emotion. Appeals to emotion are often used to incite people without them thinking through. "They killed our people!" sounds a lot more convincing/inciting than, "They had an altercation which unfortunately escalated, leading to the deaths of several people that we knew". Using emotion to obscure or not properly think about how it came to be to that point and what should be done from then on.
I think you're conflating logic (ex: mathematical logic, or far less rigorous careful reasoning) with an overly strict definition of a logical fallacy.
For example, if during a formal debate you were to threaten to harm your opponent if they didn't agree with you (an "Appeal to Force" fallacy), this wouldn't be an appropriate argument for this context. But in, say, a contract negotiation between a union and a business, the union could threaten to strike if the business doesn't agree to terms, and it can be part of a valid argument. Thus appeals to force (and, as Walton argued, all "informal fallacies") aren't inherently fallacious in all contexts. Rather, the threat of harm was an inappropriate change in context from a formal debate to a negotiation, and it's the change in context which creates these fallacies.
> Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily describe reality
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but it sounds a dangerous path to go down. People have already discarded facts - I think discarding logic as well would make things even worse.
It would later come out that there was exaggerations and embellishments in his reporting (https://insidestory.org.au/the-myth-of-keith-murdochs-gallip...)
In Australia, Gallipolli and the ANZAC mythos became part of our national identity. It is hard to explain to non-Australians the impact of the "Anzac legacy" on our culture it was like Australia's Gettysburg or Waterloo etc. Anzac Day is still celebrated and observed more than 100 years later it is a major patriotic celebration.
Murdoch also tried to use his influence to block the advancement of Sir John Monash (arguably the greatest allied general of WWI and the last person to ever be knighted on the battlefield).
consider (for example) k-12 mathematics pretty much anywhere...
I moved here 7 years ago, and my son has gone through a public elementary school and is currently in the last year of a public middle school. If it was just one year or just one teacher or even just one school (or one district), I could write it off to bad luck. Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that the whole system is abysmal.
The basics are just being taught differently.
I can say that having been through a similar curriculum in high school (implemented on the initiative of a very thoughtful literature teacher) it has been one of my most valuable mental tools I possess throughout my adult life. Being able to understand and identify logical fallacies has helped me critically evaluate the information I consume many times over.
Of course, any program like this has the problem that it needs to be implemented by a trusted source, or it will be attacked as "indoctrination" (whether or not that is the truth). I can see that as a major challenge in the US where 50%+ of the population is convinced that the government is out to get them at any one time.
A lot of school curriculums ostensibly include critical thinking skills because this is seen as important, but don't tend to teach this in practice.
Classes tend to focus on how to jump the hoops of getting good grades (without accepting any critical analysis of the grading system).
Are you then really teaching children to be critical, or really teaching them that it's best to conform to what they are told? It becomes difficult to teach children critical thinking skills, because of the way schools are presented to them as an objective authority.
I think this work can be done, however - and is most often done by lone wolf teachers acting alone and outside of classroom norms. That's certainly my experience.
You just need to frame it correctly.
The explanation was that people with some education become prideful and believed they know more then they did, easy targets for gullibility. But people lacking education had often street smarts and was less susceptible. And the ones with phd:s had learned how complicated things really are and was often reluctant to take a hard opinion about things they did not know much about.
That is by FAR the best summary of the issue I have read.
Analogy:
It's as if we've been living behind castle walls and now those walls are gone. We can now be directly attacked by enemy armies, whereas before we could only be practically reached by our own government's police and military. Having been sheltered for so long, we don't know how to hold our own without those walls.
https://saidit.net/s/Solutions/comments/50i5/how_to_investig...
The first steps are: 1) logical fallacies 2) the scientific method .. And I think that these should be part of basic education.
Then we have 4) possible fraud/crime 5) bias 6) Unknowns. Which help to understand the limits or problems with different conclusions.
And 7) solutions. is how to work towards a common acceptable solution
Perhaps in 20-30 years we will see social media as something akin to smoking. Something super dangerous, addictive and a mind virus. That's my most optimist hope.
Around the time of Snowden leaks, I decided to cancel my Facebook, Instagram, etc. accounts. I am still a YouTube junkie, it's hard to give up. But right now I think that's my only "AI algorithm curated wormhole" type of content that I consume. Even partly doing a "social media diet" has significantly improved my well-being. I was really surprised to see how much my mentality changed from the experiment. Haven't looked back since.
Because we've learned in the past decade or so that the "marketplace of ideas" fallacy is false. Ideas aren't traded like market goods; rather, they spread like disease. And the way to prevent dangerous ideas like Nazism from threatening society is the same as the way we prevent diseases like COVID from threatening society: containment. Isolate the afflicted, and implement measures to limit the exposure of everyone else.
People disputing the marketplace of ideas want to be authoritative voices in my experience. If we had been a little more relaxed in the face of objection, we might have fared better.
Anyway, if you are correct, we would need an authority on truth and I see a lot of problems already. Frankly, literature is full of examples why this is a bad idea, but don't let me stop you.